Forbidden by Susan Johnson (best feel good books txt) 📗

concern for appearances with a smile, a kiss, and a cavalier, "They won't notice."

And when of course his two servants did, with as little shock showing as they could muster, he only said while Daisy hid her face in his shoulder, "I'd like bathwater brought up and luncheon served in the garden at three." Then he murmured near Daisy's ear, "Is that all right?"

It was the simplest of queries, a courtesy from a courteous man, but his intentions were quite different from the inquiry he would have made with anyone else because her answer mattered. He wished to please her in the most trivial ways; he wanted to give her the sun and the moon, his wealth, his estates, and all his happiness and joy. He was terrified.

But she smiled up, her cheek warm against his shoulder, and offered him everything in her own simple answer.

"I don't care." She meant she didn't care about the entire world spinning away into the blackness of the galaxy as long as he was holding her. "I mean it," she added.

He smiled. "I know," he cryptically said as though they were speaking in a secret language.

François carried up the bathwater in shiny copper buckets while they sat on the balcony in the sun. "Can you stay the night?" Etienne asked after they'd passed judgment on the serenity of the river landscape, the warmth of the spring sun, the extent of their mutual insanity.

When Daisy nodded, he suggested she write a short note to Adelaide making her excuses. As on her previous visit, Guillaume would deliver the message. He rose then to bring her paper and pen, laying a small writing table across her knees on his return.

He didn't ask what she wrote, unconcerned in his habitual way with the strictures of society; he only took the envelope from her when she was finished, went downstairs, and handed it to François with directions for Guillaume.

He was gone for only a short time, but the heat of the sun was soothing. Daisy had slept poorly the previous night, and with a postcoital languor seeping through her senses, she fell asleep.

The Duc let her sleep while he bathed because his bachelor tub was only designed to accommodate one. He found himself whistling like a young boy while he washed. How long had it been since he'd been so unconditionally happy? He began planning some required renovations for his country cottage based on a concept that until recently he would have found anathema to his solitary hermitage. He would need plumbing put in—a larger bathroom and tub so Daisy would be comfortable. The original eighteenth-century cottage design had been adequate for his unsocial occupancy but his requirements had drastically altered. Would she want a telephone? He grimaced slightly at the thought, for Colsec's isolation was its greatest attraction. A moment later he shrugged away his reservations. If she wanted a telephone—he would have one installed. Pleasing her was his fondest wish and pleasure. He began mentally composing a list in his head—a lover's list meant to delight. Did she like diamonds, he wondered.

Dressed a few moments later in a simple shirt and trousers, he supervised the laying out of Daisy's bath, concerned with the exact temperature of the water, dismayed to hear he had no scented soap in his bachelor abode, fussing, François told Cook later, like a concerned mother hen.

Shutting the door behind his servant, he glanced at the bed-side clock, gauging the time until lunch and then went to wake the woman who'd renewed his faith in the possibilities for happiness in life.

Through a lazy contentment she felt his hands untying the ribbons at the waist of her chemise and only murmured a low purring sound.

The Duc kissed the last remnant of her purr while he slid her arms from the bodice sleeves of the teal blue silk, opened to her waist, but never taken off in their haste toward consummation. "I'll buy you a new dress," he murmured, noting with mild astonishment the ripped silk near several of the buttonholes.

"I've plenty more," Daisy casually replied, open-eyed and awake, stretching now she was free of her confining bodice. The styles were snug in the shoulder and sleeves, especially tailored day-gowns like hers, and she felt for a brief moment, basking under the sun, barefoot and bare-armed with her chemise unlaced, as though she were back under a prairie sun. "You'd like our summer camp," she said out of the blue, feeling an affinity very near to magic.

"Show it to me," the Duc said, as if it were not an ocean and half a continent away.

"Yes," she replied because today, this moment, she wouldn't think about his wife or what her family might say should she bring him home for summer camp.

He kissed the tip of her nose then and her mouth and all the warm and scented contours of her body as he slipped her chemise and skirt and petticoats from her. "I need a bath," she apologized, for he was clean and freshly dressed while the odor of their love-making clung to her body.

He could have disagreed, for there was a provocative sense of fertility goddess in the scent of her, like female incitement on the most primordial level. But he agreed instead, to appease her sensibilities, saying, "You'll feel better after a bath." And so saying, he repressed his more fundamental urges, picked her up, carried her to the tub, and slid her into the warm water.

He sat like a circumspect suitor in a drawing room might while she bathed, although his lounging posture was typically de Vec—assured, gently patrician. And he spoke of trivalities, wishing her to be comfortable.

"Have I known you a thousand years?" Daisy asked, sliding down into the water to rise the soap from her shoulders, thinking how familiar Etienne seemed.

"I don't know," he replied, "but certainly you will for the next thousand."

"You're unprincipled."

"Perhaps, but I'm happy." The sting of society's slurs had been bred out of the de Vecs